Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill

Members, when we were last debating this bill, Alastair Scott had the call, and he has 6 minutes remaining to speak, if he wishes.

I had a couple of minutes explaining some of the problems with the—

💬 Kris Faafoi: Start again—start again.

I am not going to start again. I would not want to put you through it all. I will do the last 5 or 6 minutes, and we were talking about the inconsistency in the Crimes Act. Providing an explosive to someone for the purpose of an offence is objectively worse than carrying an offensive weapon—that is what the bill is all about—so the maximum sentence should be higher. A maximum 5-year imprisonment is needed to adequately reflect the seriousness of the offence and to deter others, without being unnecessarily harsh. The offence does not have a minimum penalty, and so when sentencing of this offence arises in court a judge can impose a fair and reasonable penalty without being restricted to a maximum of 2 years’ imprisonment.

The Government is committed to reducing crime and making our communities safer. We are boosting police staff by 1,125, including 880 extra front-line officers as part of our half-billion-dollar Safer Communities package. This means increased staff numbers across all 12 police districts—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! [Interruption] Order! The member will resume his seat. There has been some criticism, especially in submissions to the Standing Orders Committee, in relation to what might be described as sort of slack chairing with regard to relevance for debate. I am going to be quite strict and ask the member to speak to the bill, rather than—[Interruption]—having a more general debate. When I sit down, I am going to ask the member who interjected when I was on my feet to withdraw and apologise.

💬 Kris Faafoi: I withdraw and apologise.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Thank you.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. My understanding was that a second reading speech should be very specific to the bill, but a first reading speech could be broader and more wide ranging than a second reading speech.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): It can be wide ranging around the bill, but it cannot be a rehearsal of Budget debates or debates that have been held earlier in the year.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

💬 Stuart Nash: That is one way to wind down the clock. Just do not say anything.

I want to be specific, so just give me a couple of seconds.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Should I make it clear to the member that there is not an obligation to use the full time if the member is not prepared?

No, I accept that. I accept that, Mr Assistant Speaker. I will summarise. This is about the inconsistent sentencing guidelines in the Crimes Act. Under section 202A, individuals simply carrying or possessing dangerous weapons unlawfully are potentially liable for a longer imprisonment term than an individual who knowingly provides explosives intended to endanger people or property. That is the nub of it, and that does not make sense to me. A person carrying an offensive weapon, even when they do not cause any harm, can face a term of imprisonment of up to 3 years, and yet a person who provides an explosive such as a bomb, knowing it will be used to commit a crime, can be imprisoned for only up to 2 years. That is the nub of it, and I will resume my seat.

I call Stuart Nash. Sorry, we are having some problem with the clocks here. We will get there.

Look, I actually felt for the member Alastair Scott—you know, when he stood there silent for 20 seconds—because I have got to speak for 10 minutes on this bill as well, and if I read this bill out very, very slowly, including the explanatory note, I think I would make it to 4 minutes and 22 seconds. So making a 10-minute speech out of a 4-minute bill is actually a real challenge, but it is one that I will take up with gusto.

The interesting thing is that the member before Mr Scott, Andrew Bayly, stood up, and he spoke passionately. He was really passionate. He talked about finance and expenditure, and he talked about closing tax loops, and he talked about foreign companies, and he was raging. He was on a roll, but unfortunately he was stopped. He was stopped. When he talked about all the great things and the meaningful things the Government is doing, he was stopped so we could debate the Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill.

As a member of Parliament I take my role very seriously, and I take seriously the fact that passing legislation in this House is one of the privileges that we actually get when we are members of Parliament. Debating legislation and giving it a full debate is very, very important, and I think that is what New Zealanders expect. But the thing is that we have a bill in front of us now that is five clauses long. Maybe it is important, because the last thing we want, to be honest, is, you know, cowboys riding horses down the main street and blowing up safes after stealing dynamite from the local goldmine.

💬 Kris Faafoi: Is it a member’s bill, though?

Well, Mr Faafoi has a very interesting point. There may well be a discrepancy in the Crimes Act if a person provides explosives for the purpose of committing a crime. The last thing we want as New Zealanders is for criminals to say: “Well, you know, I might as well just give this bloke explosives, because if I give him a gun, I could go down for 5 years, but if I give him a stick of dynamite I’m only going to go down for 2 years.”

I have not seen evidence, and that is why—I suspect this is going to go to a select committee I am on—I would be very keen to hear evidence from the police as to whether, in fact, the term of only 2 years for providing explosives for the purpose of committing a crime has been either a deterrent or an enabler in terms of the weapons people use to commit crimes. Maybe what we will find—and only the police will know, because I must admit we have not got a regulatory impact statement or anything like that—is that the police will say: “Hey, no, this is a real problem. We do have a real problem with this, and what we’ve seen is around about a thousand people a year providing explosives for the purpose of committing a crime. And what we want is—we need the ability to lock them up for 5 years, because 2 years isn’t enough.” If that comes across a select committee table—if the police provide that evidence to our committee that shows that the law is an ass, because people are not providing guns, they are providing explosives—then Mr Scott will have done us a favour.

But I suspect—and I have nothing to go on this, and we have just done a firearms inquiry and we have heard a lot of evidence from the police and a whole lot of different interest groups—that, in fact, there have not been many New Zealanders over the last 10 years who have actually provided explosives to commit crimes. And I also agree with Mr Scott on one point, though, which is that the sentence has got to fit the crime. But what happens in this House, as we are well aware, is there are a number of amendment bills. There are, you know, Crimes Act amendment bills. There are statute amendment bills. There are a whole lot of amendment bills—

💬 Kris Faafoi: Statutes amendment bills.

—yes, sorry; statutes amendment bills—and omnibus bills—that actually have a look at these sorts of things, and our officials are forever going through pieces of legislation because, of course, when one piece of legislation changes, then it affects another piece of legislation. If a new crime is introduced and the penalty is X, you know, we have to get things in whack—of that there is no doubt. But I am just saying that the time we are going to spend on this bill, I think, could have been better spent if, in fact, this was part of a Crimes Act amendment bill, because I suspect that next Crimes Act amendment bill—and this goes back to 1961. I do not know how many amendment bills there have been for the Crimes Act, but I suspect there are a whole lot. But what I think could have happened is in the next crimes amendment bill, there will be—let us figure—15 or 20 different amendments to penalties for different crimes, because what we are seeing with the advent of things like P, with new weapons, with Tasers, and with all this debate going on in the community is that people are looking at the different penalties for different crimes.

I mean, let me give you an example. One of the recommendations that we have made—and this has not been passed by the committee yet—is that in terms of firearms offences, we need to look at the penalties, and not only do we need to look at the penalties in a New Zealand context but we also need to look at the penalties in a global context. What are the Australians doing, for example? What happens in Canada? What happens in the UK—so different Commonwealth countries. But when it comes to this bill, when the only purpose of this bill is not to redefine explosives, it is not to look at a different type of weapon—because the irony is that we are not only amending a certain section of the Crimes Act, we are amending a subsection of that section in the Crimes Act. We are amending section 272 of the Crimes Act, but, in fact, section 272 talks about “explosive substance,” which, of course, is what we are dealing with here, but also a “dangerous engine, instrument, or thing with intent to use or enable another person” to commit such an offence. There are a whole lot of different things within the specific clause. So, really, if the crime does not match the time, there is a much better way to deal with this, which I think could have really optimised members’ time in the House.

You know, the cynic in me says that Mr Scott put this in the ballot. He was told by his whips to put this bill in the ballot. He knew it was not going to get drawn out, because there are, what, 120 bills in the ballot. When this was drawn out, I can imagine Mr Scott in his office going “Oh, my gosh! What am I going to talk about?”, and the reason I can imagine that is that when he was actually standing here charged with speaking about the bill, there was a 20-second gap. Twenty seconds is not long if you are holding your breath or you are doing something else—

💬 Peeni Henare: Enough for an explosive.

—yeah, ha, ha, exactly, Mr Henare—but when you are supposed to be giving a speech on your own bill, after about 3 minutes, it is a long time, because there is nothing much to say about this bill.

Of course we support it. Of course we are going to support it. I mean, I do not want someone who provides explosives for the purpose of committing a crime to get away scot-free or to go down for only 2 years. In fact, I wonder—and we will find this out at the select committee, and I think the member gets another turn to speak on this later on, does he not—whether this is actually being led by the judiciary. Maybe a member of the judiciary has approached Mr Scott—and he can enlighten us in his last speech—and said “Mr Scott, as my local MP, I have a real concern, because I’ve had a whole lot of people in front of my bench in my court who have been done for providing explosives, and I can put them away for only 2 years and it is just not right, because the potential harm of their actions if they had not got caught would have been significant.”, and maybe that is why we are here. Maybe this is a really important piece of legislation, and Mr Scott just forgot to elaborate when he was giving his speech.

But, again, I suspect that there has not been a well-meaning judge. I suspect there has not been a constituent delegation that has approached his office and said: “We have this issue.” In fact, I suspect that if Mr Scott actually spent some time in his electorate, he would find that there are a lot of issues that people in Waipukurau and in Masterton have that are more important than this.

In fact, I suspect that Mr Scott will not be putting out a press release after we conclude the reading of this bill, stating that his member’s bill on Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill has gone through. And I suspect that if he did, it probably would not make the front page of the “Masterton Star” or the Wairarapa Times-Age. It might, but I suspect it probably would not.

So, at the risk of sounding a little arrogant—and I do not mean to at all, because I think that is a most ugly trait—could I suggest to Mr Scott that perhaps in future he concentrates on things that are really important in an electorate.

💬 Aupito William Sio: Like housing.

Like housing, like jobs, like economic development, like growth—

Order! The member will resume his seat.

Mr Assistant Speaker, I do seek your indulgence while I attempt to make a comparison of the consequences of using explosives for the committing of a crime. This bill did remind me of a significant explosion event that happened quite some time ago, if you:

Remember, remember!

The fifth of November,

The Gunpowder treason and plot;

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder treason should ever be forgot!

So we do not forget this example of the use of explosives for the purpose of committing a crime. Even though it happened in 1605, 412 years ago, it is emblazoned in the night sky every year on 5 November. However, it may not be well-known that the ringleader in this crime, Mr Guy Fawkes, was one of 13 conspirators in the crime of using explosives to commit a crime—as is mentioned in the amendment bill before us tonight. But because poor old Mr Fawkes was the one who was foiled in his attempt, he was found by the King’s guard and imprisoned and was tortured for several days, until he confessed to the crime and dobbed in his comrades.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): OK, the member is now 30 percent of the way into her speech. I would like her to now start speaking to the bill.

I was just about there, Mr Assistant Speaker.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Well, I am very pleased. You showed no sign of it.

Now, to relate to the consequences, the traditional penalty for traitors in the 17th century was to be hanged from the gallows, then hung, drawn, and quartered. However, Mr Fawkes did not do that, because he took things into his own hands and leapt off the gallows and broke his own neck. However, the consequences today fall well short of those, and all we are looking to do is increase the penalty for the use of explosives, from 2 years to 5 years.

Individuals who carry dangerous weapons can look forward to longer prison terms than they would if they were supplying explosives for the committing of a crime, and explosives can have much more dire consequences, such as the intention of destroying people or property. This is an anomaly that needs addressing, and, thanks to my colleague Alastair Scott, we can look forward to these harsher penalties. It makes absolutely perfectly good sense when the consequences of using explosives are so extreme, and they cause immeasurable harm to innocent bystanders and, of course, disastrous consequences and damage to property.

National has an impressive track record not just on toughening sentencing laws but also on putting the victims of crime at the forefront of our thinking, by investing in our Safer Communities package and putting more law enforcement on the ground—880 new police on the front line, with 245 more—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): When I stand up, the member sits down. That is one of the rules of the place. For members on both sides, when they have got on to things that sounded like research unit notes, in one case I terminated the call and in the other I asked the member to come back to the bill. I am going to do the same for the member now and ask her to speak to the bill.

We are back to talking about the clauses in the bill. I would like to refer to clause 4, which sets out that the purpose of this bill is to increase the maximum penalty from 2 years’ to 5 years’ imprisonment for the use and supply of explosives for the commitment of a crime.

I commend my colleague Alastair Scott for his initiative in having this bill put into the ballot and for his good fortune in having the bill drawn from the ballot. So that is divine intervention in making sure that we address these issues that are of importance to our communities. I commend this bill to the House.

In recent times we have seen some useful members’ bills from the National Government. They have had substance, they have identified gaps or flaws in legislation, and they have sought to put those right. Sadly, in the view of the Green Party, this is not one of those bills. Its great virtue is that it is succinct. It is a brief bill. If brevity be the soul of wit, if Polonius had it right, then the drafter of this bill is a man of remarkable acumen, is all I can say. I have not seen a bill before where the title exceeded the substance. The title of this bill runs to 11 words; the substantive change manages only six words and three numbers. That is a remarkable balance, in terms of the content of a bill.

The bill rests essentially on three assumptions. The first one is that the penalty for providing explosives to commit crime is not comparable to similar offences. That is not a view shared with any enthusiasm by justice ministry officials. The Minister of Justice was kind enough—it only took a month—to respond to an Official Information Act request for a document entitled Comments on a Member’s Bill; Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill. The opening line from a senior official in the ministry states: “Our original assessment of the bill is that the bill is not outside the range of comparable offences.” OK. The point has been made, quite rightly, that individuals carrying or possessing dangerous weapons, if that is the charge, are liable to longer sentences. But the official goes on to say that section 202 of the Crimes Act, which the member referenced, broadly defines offensive weapons to include explosives. So anybody carrying explosives could be subject to those higher penalties. Indeed, the police are fairly bright in this sort of stuff. They would almost certainly bring charges under the Arms Act, which do carry significantly higher penalties. So the opinion of the Ministry of Justice is that their primary assumption fails—that there is an issue of comparability. There is no such problem.

Secondly, one would expect to see, with a bill of this sort in front of the House, that there had been some upsurge in offending, that there are people all over the country busily providing explosives to commit crimes. Our friends at the Parliamentary Library provided a very useful table showing the number of convictions against section 272 and, specifically, convictions of people who were charged and found guilty of providing explosives to commit crime.

In the year 2015-2016, the most recent year for which we have numbers, the number was zero; there were none. There was a dramatic increase in the year 2014-2015. There was one conviction for that offence. We then had a rather dry spell. In the 5 years from 2009 to 2014 there were no convictions for this offence. There was a real peak in 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. In each of those years there was one conviction. What we are looking at is three convictions for this offence in the last decade. That, to me, is not a crime wave. I do not actually see that we have a serious problem with the criminal element thinking they can get away with this because, after all, it is only a 2-year penalty.

The third assumption made here is that longer sentences are a deterrent. We have known for at least the last 15 years that all of the research says that longer sentences are not a deterrent. The first substantive bit of work done, around 2000, 2001 by Canadian researchers, challenged that. In fact they started to indicate “Hang on. What’s going on here?”. More recent research, done right here in New Zealand, indicates that longer sentences almost invariably lead to higher recidivism rates. So the connection between longer sentences and the deterrent effect has been broken for a number of years.

The reason we put people in prison for a long time is to keep them off the streets. That is the only deterrent value, and actually it is disabling them from offending. There is no sense of deterrence in it. There is no evidence. In fact, the evidence is all to the contrary—that in fact putting people away for longer is not a helpful thing. This bill, in our view, addresses a problem that does not exist and offers a solution that will not work. So, sadly, we cannot support it.

First of all, I would like to congratulate the member on bringing this bill to the House. I know it is a great honour to have a bill drawn from the ballot. In 9 years I have had one bill drawn. Some members have good luck; they get a few bills drawn, consequently.

The main purpose of this bill, the Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill, is to increase the penalty from 2 years’ to 5 years’ imprisonment for providing explosives to commit an offence.

It is important, and we need to understand that we have to make sure members of our society feels safe in their homes and their communities. It is very important because if we do not feel safe in our homes or in our communities, it means that we are not safe anywhere. This Government has been having this agenda to increase the resources and increase the penalties for people convicted of committing crime. National has been building on this for the last 9 years, and this is a good gesture, on behalf of the Government, from the member who has brought this bill to the House.

This bill will ensure that nobody provides tools to commit crime. This bill will be a deterrent. The previous speaker was saying that convictions have been low, but I think it is important that we should have the appropriate provisions whereby a person who is convicted is given a proper conviction and penalty, so that he is not going to reoffend. That will really help us to reduce reoffending, because this Government has got a target of reducing reoffending by 25 percent.

We hope that the tougher sentences provided by the courts will help to make society secure. This bill is a part of that. National has removed the eligibility for parole for first repeat violent offenders who commit the worst crimes, with the three-strikes law. Mr Assistant Speaker, I am coming back to the bill, but I am just adding that what we have done in the past 9 years is relevant to the bill. It is part of the deterrent that we think will reduce reoffending. These are the things that we have to understand.

We have to think about a few things that are set out in this bill. The legislation is to commence “on the day after the date on which this Act receives the Royal assent.”, as clause 2 states. We hope that in the select committee there will be some interest from the public in making some submissions. The committee is excited to have this bill in front of it, to process it, and to report it back to the House as soon as possible. Once again, I acknowledge the member Alastair Scott for bringing this bill to the House. I support this bill.

Far be it from me to traverse some of the terrain that has been debated and discussed in the House this evening, but I cannot go—on behalf of the people of the Wairarapa—without complimenting the member Alastair Scott for the hard work. I read in the newspaper that he sweated many long hours over this issue, which clearly has vexed him for quite some time! He had the courage to put his very lengthy bill into the ballot, in the hope that it might be drawn so that everyone in the Wairarapa could sleep easier knowing full well that the member for the Wairarapa, Alastair Scott, was on the job!

I know much has been made of his bill this evening, and it was treated somewhat lightly, but I do have to remind the House—if I could come to his assistance in some way—that the use of explosives in New Zealand is not new in commissioning crimes. Mr Scott brings to the attention of the House the 1984 bombing of the Wellington Trades Hall on 29 March, at 5.19 p.m., when caretaker Ernie Hall and his dog were blown up, and he was killed. One could argue that had this bill been around at the time and had the perpetrator of that bombing been caught, then a far tougher sentence might have been made available.

But when we in New Zealand First look at this bill and we consider the fact that Ernie Hall was killed—

💬 Alastair Scott: Ernie Abbott.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Ernie Abbott.

Sorry, Ernie Abbott—I wrote that down wrong. When Ernie Abbott was killed, the charge that the perpetuator of that bombing would have faced would have been murder, with the full weight of the law and the full range of sentences available.

I guess one of the things that concerns us is why, when Mr Scott put this bill together, he did not make the 5 years mandatory. He has left it open-ended by making the sentence one of not exceeding 5 years. One would have thought, and I know in the Wairarapa people are asking this, that if their MP, Alastair Scott, spent so many nights staying up late—until 3 a.m., I might have been told—drafting this bill, he would have thought, if it was so serious, that the minimum penalty would be 5 years, and not, as we currently have, a proposal to increase the sentence from 2 years to a period not exceeding 5 years. So we are probably going to address that issue in select committee and try to encourage Mr Scott to accept an amendment to his bill.

I guess Mr Scott might well have been thinking of the Rainbow Warrior, the bombing of that vessel and the death of a person there, but, once again, we are going to have to ask Mr Scott: “Well, did the other aspects of New Zealand law not take care of that crime in an appropriate manner?”.

We are trying to be as generous as we can to Mr Scott, because we know how much time he has put into this. And I know that he has put aside the issues of homelessness in the Wairarapa—he is not so worried about the 74-year-old who came to my office who cannot get accommodation anymore because the member’s National Government sold off all the State houses over there and there is nothing to rent. He is not worried about the fact that small businesses are screaming at him about the fact that this bill does not contain anything to alleviate the pains they are suffering from the earthquake legislation or the health and safety legislation.

We will try our best to get Mr Scott to look at a couple of things. I know that he still reflects on the Rainbow Warrior, I know that he still reflects on Ernie Abbott’s death, and I know that it pains him and worries him that people might use explosives to commission crimes. But we would hope that in the investigations—which will be very thorough and very expensive, let me assure the taxpayer, as the select committee progresses through this bill—he would look to make the penalty mandatory, and we would hope that he would examine the other penalties available for people who commit crimes of terrorism, which cause murder and which cause grievous bodily harm to innocent citizens. We would hope that he would pay the same attention that he has clearly got in the back of his mind, in that respect, to other such policies, and maybe come forward with an amendment to some of our Immigration Act policies, because it is there that some of us believe these risks most appropriately lie.

I would have to say that this bill is about a very serious topic; that seems to have eluded some members of this House who have laughed at different aspects of it. Even the faux gravitas of the previous speaker, Ron Mark, is somewhat alarming. I say this because we actually live in a nation of relative safety, compared with other nations of the world.

I hold in my hand a report from the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology from the Houses of Parliament in London. This paper speaks about explosive injury. None of us would laugh about this subject if we were in the House of Commons; we would be quite serious, I think. I think that we ought to have a degree of sobriety around this topic, because it is speaking about a form of injury of people. We are not talking about somebody sticking a bit of dynamite on to a safe and running away and blowing it up; we are talking about how explosives are used these days to create multiple severely injured casualties in a single incident. We are talking about the form of injury that explosives create and that we want to do something about that so that the supply of them is seen in a far more serious light than a maximum penalty of 2 years.

If I can, let me speak just briefly about a few aspects of this horrendous form of injury that would help us, I think, understand that this is something that the select committee ought to seriously consider. I probably do agree with the former speaker Ron Mark, who looked at this length of term of imprisonment of 5 years, and I think that, because of what these sorts of injuries can do, we need to look at something a little bit greater than that.

There are multiple forms of explosives, as we know. There is an initiator of an explosive, there is gas, and there is ejecta that happen. “The trigger excites the explosive main charge, and a chemical reaction converts the explosive into a hot, high-pressure gas, producing a shock or high pressure wave. The shock wave and the hot, high pressure gas released by the explosive propagates through its surrounding [casings].” This is quite interesting because modern technology—not ancient technology—is quite devastating. “Gas: expands [rapidly] under pressure typically in excess of 1 million times that of the Earth’s atmosphere, at 6,000°C.” So let us have some, I guess, consideration of those issues. “If trapped, the gas vents through gaps in the fractured container and soil at [approximately] 4 km per second,”.

So what I am saying is that these elements are devastating, and we ought to have, in regard to this bill, I think, some consideration around how we can see the sentencing around people who perpetrate knowingly, who are involved in the supply chain of such elements, who have no regard for the fact that it can create impartial injury. We ought to ask the select committee to look at this with great seriousness and look at whether those sentences are indeed adequate. Thank you, I am very happy to commend this bill to the House. Thank you very much to Alastair Scott for bringing it to the House.

The previous speaker, Jonathan Young, said that we should not be treating this like a joke, and we are not. And I hate myself for laughing. I hate myself for laughing, but when Mr Bakshi got up and acknowledged his colleague for bringing this bill in, all I saw Mr Alastair Scott wanting to do was to hide. When Mr Kris Faafoi says that this is one bill that will not be publicised and there will be no publicity around this—

💬 Stuart Nash: That was me.

—we could see—oh, maybe it was Mr Stuart Nash. We could see Mr Alastair Scott sort of hide. So I cannot help it, and I hate myself for laughing because it is a serious matter, but it is just the way that this bill has been brought about. Most people would stand up and be very proud of this occasion, and then I saw Mr Alastair Scott stand there in silence for 20 or 30 seconds.

I just happened to read about the Wanganui Computer Centre bombing, and this is serious because it was a young man in 1982, a 22-year-old, Neil Roberts, who was killed during the Wanganui Computer Centre bombing. He was antiracist, he was an anarchist in the peace movement, and what he did was he targeted the computer rather than the police personnel, but he has died as a result of the explosion. He left a graffiti message and the graffiti message says: “We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity.” I am not trying to belittle Mr Alastair Scott. It is just that sometimes we in the House, or in this case the Government—I see Mr Scott holding this flag, holding up this bill called the Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill whilst everything is burning around us in this House. Everything is burning, and here is Mr Scott holding up the flag on this particular bill.

This is the bill that I am holding up—on one piece of paper. That is the bill that this Parliament is now charged with debating and referring to select committee, and then it will come back to the House for the second reading and the final reading. I do not know how much it would cost for that particular process, but I would suspect—as Mr Ron Mark says, what about the other issues? What about the more meaty issues that our communities are facing?

If we look at clause 1, that is the title clause. Clause 2 is when the bill will commence. Clause 3 is referring to the principal Act, which is the Crimes Act 1961. Clause 4 sets out the purpose of the Act, which is increasing the penalty from 2 to 5 years, and clause 5 is section 272, which he is amending. There is nothing further. So I now understand why Mr Scott sort of stood there in silence and was not sure how to complete his 10-minute speech. He was stunned. I was stunned, you know, because this is his bill.

But I want to take on board what the Green Party said about increasing the penalty from 2 to 5 years. If we look to Florida, where they have this rule called 10/20 life rule—if you produce a firearm to commit a crime, it is 10 years. If you fire a firearm during a crime, it is 20 years. If you shoot somebody, irrespective of whether that person dies or not, it is life. We know how harsh those penalties are, and I suspect that that is what Mr Scott wanted to do with this bill, which is to make the penalty harsher. But has it reduced crime in those countries? No. So I am not quite sure what he is trying to do with this bill. It would have been better if he looked at reviewing the whole Crimes Act of 1961.

I also note that in the original bill it refers to providing explosives. So we are not talking about people blowing things up. We are talking about somebody walking down with a stick of dynamite, but where do they get those? It would be pretty hard to get, and, as the Green Party has pointed out, there have been three convictions in the last 10 years. Is it really appropriate for this Parliament to spend resources and time when we have got meatier matters? The original Act talks about “explosive substance”. There is no definition in the original Act, so we do not know what that means. The original Act talks about “dangerous engine”—

Order! The member’s time has expired. I do want to compliment him for being both relevant and original.

I want to start by congratulating Alastair Scott on being lucky enough to draw a bill from the ballot. I have had a go at it—cannot draw one. A number of other members of the House have had a number of goes but cannot draw them, but he has drawn this one, and I think it is a very interesting bill. When you think about the history of parliaments around the world, explosives have played a large part in the dealings of parliaments. In fact, one of my very own constituents turned up here a year ago and tried to burn the place down. It is dangerous stuff. So I congratulate Mr Scott on drawing this bill from the ballot, and I concur with the last speaker, Aupito William Sio, that it has taken a lot of trees, a lot of paper, to get it to the House and to have some impact.

I want to pick up a couple of issues that have been raised by other speakers, particularly David Clendon. I want to take issue with his records, for a start, because I do not think his records are entirely correct. But I also want to take issue with the research he had done that told him that increasing the penalties for a crime that is committed only once every 2 or 3 years really is not worthwhile. I think from a police perspective a more serious penalty may well give the police more encouragement to prosecute, for example. I have a bill in the ballot myself on livestock rustling, and I am pretty sure that with more serious fines we would see much more reporting and much more serious note taken of those crimes, and perhaps we would get more prosecutions and, as a consequence of that, less crime.

I would also like to take issue with Mr Mark, for a moment, because he spent a lot of time talking about the great effort or the length of time that Alastair Scott had put into designing this bill. I am quite sure it did not taken quite as long as Mr Mark thought, as he is an intelligent man. I then want to take issue with Mr Mark’s, I guess, veering into areas that were clearly the responsibility of Mr Scott as the MP for Wairarapa. Mr Mark had no business dealing in some of the issues that he started to talk about during the course of that epistle that he gave us.

When I was young explosives were a great game, and we used to blow all sorts of things up, right from the test tubes in the laboratory at school to trees of all sorts, and explosives in those days were much more freely available than they are now.

The other issue I want to raise in respect of these issues—and it is a common issue for a lot of the electorate MPs in this area and I am sure for the member for Hutt South—is the issue of fireworks and the terror, I guess, that they create for animals. I think it is not so bad having 1 or 2 days a year when we can blow things up, but I think to have it broadly across the sphere is not so good.

So I think this bill is worth bringing to the House. It is part of the National Party’s and the National Government’s policy to strengthen law. And, as I said in the debate last night on another law and order bill, every little piece of titivating we do to legislation related to law and order is a great assistance to the police and to the law and order and enforcement authorities. You just never know when the critical initiative around legislation is going to make a great deal of difference to the way we treat things and the way we look at the harm done and the damage done by, in this instance, explosives; last night it was done by sexual offenders. And we are constantly dealing with these law and order issues in this House.

So I think Mr Scott has done a pretty good job bringing this extensive bill to the House, and it will, as I said earlier, complement the Government’s efforts to just tighten up the law and order area a little bit. I did wonder when I first saw this bill whether this was meant to penalise the person who blew the thing up or just the person who gave the explosive to the person to blow the thing up. I find it is really just to penalise more seriously the person who gives the explosives to the criminal who then blows the thing up, which I think is quite interesting. Hopefully, that person who does use the explosive will get seriously penalised for the crime.

So I will wind up my short contribution to this very interesting piece of legislation by saying that we will look forward to it—I assume it will come to the Law and Order Committee under the very confident chairmanship of my colleague in the next seat, Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi—and we will look forward to the debate that we will have during the course of it. I congratulate again Mr Scott and look forward to hearing his summing up. Thank you.

I always stand in this House and declare what an honour and a privilege it is to speak on legislation. In this case, it is a duty. The crimes amendment—

💬 Hon Members: Ha, ha!

Oh, catch up, everyone. The crimes amendment bill, which is the Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill—on this international day for women, I think about the accountabilities that I would have and the criticism that I would receive if I were to introduce a bill that I think is not a wise and fair use of the resources of the House, of our debating time, and of our analysis and resources. So I will make that very clear from the start.

We are opposing this bill for its substance, and I also want to make it clear that I think that there are far more important areas of justice that we need to be utilising our time for—particularly at a time where communities and constituencies are really struggling to find and connect and find relevance to what we here are doing in this House. This bill will increase the maximum penalty for the provision of explosives to commit an offence from 2 years to 5 years. As my colleague David Clendon said, there is no obvious concern at present about the growing use of explosives, and in 10 years there have been three convictions and the majority of those were farther away ago in time.

Recently, in the past 8 years, there has been one conviction. So there is no obvious concern—then, why? Why has this bill come to this place, particularly in the event that there is little evidence that criminals even respond to harsher sentences in the way that we would like them to? If there is some evidence that they do respond to harsher sentencing, then it is concentrated in the first few years, even, and that is the first 2 to 3 years that is already the current situation’s maximum penalty for this particular crime. This increasing maximum penalty comes at a time when in New Zealand our incarceration rates are disgraceful. We have reached 10,000 prisoners now. We are the seventh highest country in the OECD when it comes to churning out billions of dollars of resource to put people in prison, which does not have the effect of creating safer communities and certainly does not reduce reoffending.

Instead, if we did want to spend time on legislation and debate and working together across the House, it should be a move to things such as restorative justice. The National member Mr Jonathan Young spoke before about maintaining sobriety when we discuss the harsh and violent nature of explosive crime. The thing with restorative justice is that it puts victims at the centre of the process and seeks to really heal the harm. [Interruption] Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. It also has a focus on community involvement and it gets the offender to take true responsibility for what they have done.

Bringing this legislation to the House, in my opinion, was not just an unwise use of our resources but also does not attack the core of how to properly heal from the harms of the crimes that take place from explosives. Instead of the mismatch between supposed sentences in legislation, we should be looking at other mismatches in justice—for example, between sentencing Māori and non-Māori young people, where doing the same thing can bring a non-Māori and a Māori a completely different sentence. I will just end by saying again that we should be looking at what actually will bring reoffending rates down and create truly safer communities. Thank you.

In reply, I would like to say a couple of things. We are not talking about how Māori are treated differently in the justice system. We are not talking about earthquakes. We are talking about a very simple piece of legislation—in fact, a one-pager. It is a one-pager. All it does is allow the penalty to be increased for those who are interested in possessing explosives to blow someone up, obviously. So that is it. That is it. It is very, very simple, but it is very, very important, and I will tell you why. It sends a message. It sends a message to the community, and it sends a message through the judiciary, to say that this is a serious matter.

Mr Clendon is right. It might be that a person in possession of explosives could be caught under some other category of the Crimes Act. But this makes it explicit, and those categories do not have a maximum of 5 years’ imprisonment.

So, for those who say “Oh, it’s never happened.”, “It’s hardly happened.”, or “It’s not going to happen.”, well, let us just imagine if it did happen. Let us imagine that if the guy who was out on the pavement just recently with a carload of fuel for the purpose of blowing this place up—imagine if that had happened. He is up for only 2 years at the moment. He is up for only 2 years, but we have spent a lot of money around this place on putting in bollards to protect ourselves from numbskulls who have some idea that they want to blow people up.

You know, I cannot understand, Mr Clendon, your view that because there have been only half a dozen people arrested or charged or locked up—that is just not relevant. It is absolutely not relevant. That is like saying: “Oh, no one’s ever going to drive two planes into a tower and kill 5,000 people, because it has never happened before.” Well, Mr Clendon, get into the real world.

There are new technologies out there. There are real scary people out there who are interested in blowing this place up. Whether it be gangs out there, whether it be on just a political basis, whether it is protecting their P patch, whether it is protecting their tinny house, there are ways and means that people will take on, and they will use explosives to make their point or to defend their patch. For someone to be able to provide explosives for that purpose and walk away with only 2 years maximum is just a nonsense. It is just a nonsense, and it demonstrates again that you guys are soft on crime.

You may say that some sentences should be this way and that way and that we should not lock people up for ever, and all that sort of carry on, but let us get it right. Let us get it right with regard to a degree of the importance of the sentence.

Mr Mark had a point. Mr Mark had a very reasonable point. Maybe it should be 5 years minimum. Maybe it should be 5 years minimum. I am not going to agree or disagree with Mr Mark at this point, and that is why it is important that it goes to a select committee so that people can discuss and consult. Perhaps we will get Mr Clendon’s vote in the second reading, after he has actually understood the issue and the risks that are involved in having people carrying around explosives, letting them off with smart phones.

You know, this technology has moved on since Ernie Abbott’s explosion. Technology has enabled people to get away with a lot more things. But also, obviously, with surveillance and so on, it is a good thing as well. Nevertheless, there are people out there who are interested in harming others, and we need to send a clear message that carrying explosives and using explosives for the purpose of damaging property and humans is unacceptable and will be punished.